Law Commons^™

Federal Courts’ Recalcitrance In Refusing To Certify State Law Covid-19 Business Interruption Insurance Issues, Christopher French

Journal Articles

Over 2,000 COVID-19 business interruption insurance cases have been filed in state and federal courts the past two years with most of the cases filed in or removed to federal courts. The cases are governed by state law. Rather than certify the novel state law issues presented in the cases to the respective state supreme courts that ultimately will determine the law applicable in the cases, each of the eight federal circuit courts to issue decisions on the merits in such cases to date has done so by making an Erie guess regarding how the controlling state supreme courts would …

Structuring Jurisdictional Rules And Standards, Scott Dodson, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

Jonathan Remy Nash's article, On the Efficient Deployment of Rules and Standards to Define Federal Jurisdiction, bravely tackles and creatively merges-the dual debates over rules versus standards and the ideal contours of federal jurisdiction.' He proposes a revised regime in which rules define jurisdictional boundaries at the front end, while standards "migrate" into a discretionary abstention phase at the back end.² This realignment, Nash argues, optimizes efficiency and predictability by placing a bright-line rule at the jurisdictional threshold, while promoting federalism by establishing a safety net that applies standards to claims that cross the threshold. ³ In this …

Duplicative Foreign Litigation, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

What should a court do when a lawsuit involving the same parties and the same issues is already pending in the court of another country? With the growth of transnational litigation, the issue of reactive, duplicative proceedings - and the waste inherent in such duplication - becomes a more common problem. The future does not promise change. In a modern, globalized world, litigants are increasingly tempted to forum shop among countries to find courts and law more favorably inclined to them than their opponents.

The federal courts, however, do not yet have a coherent response to the problem. They apply …